Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Be One with Your Customer

Most companies fundamentally pay lip-service to customer-centricity. The economics make it so. If I spend a $1 on sales and marketing, I might get $5 in ongoing revenue pretty quickly. So it always makes sense to spend money on sales and marketing in the short term. If it spend a $1 on product and engineering, I might get $100 back in long-term revenue for my business. The return on $1 dollar spent on “customer-centricity?” Not clear. And therefore most companies shortchange their customer-facing organizations with people who cost less and add less value. I’ve never believed in that.

At BloomReach, we have some of the brightest people in the world solving problems for our customers. They don’t just take people out to lunch or dinner and say, “I’ll get back to you” when they get a hard question. They understand the product. They understand our business. They understand our customers businesses. They are analytical and organized. Some are technical. Some are business people. And we spent the same amount of money in 2013 on making customers successful as on marketing. There is no better marketing investment than a $1 spent on making a customer successful.

But how do you make a customer successful? If you want to be customer-centric, the key is to be one with your customer, at least for a day. I see tons of technology companies who say they have found a deep “customer pain point.” Or they say they have found a solution that will deliver an improved return on some part of their customers activities. But when you break it down, customers don’t have “pain.” They are not walking around looking for “ROI.” Searching for ROI might be part of what they do, but its not who they are. They are real people. We have great customers at BloomReach and they are some of the smartest, highest integrity business people I have ever worked with. One of our customers is spending time trying to drive search traffic to his website. Another one is figuring out how to convince his boss to redirect spending to a new project. Another is trying to replace the technical people who are leaving his IT organization. Another one is transforming the retail industry. Another one is tired of all the politics around her. Technology is supposed to make their lives better, not add irrelevant meetings to already busy calendars. If you want to build a great customer-centric company, don’t just put window-dressing on poor fundamentals. Step back and ask yourself some basic questions:

1. Are you solving a problem that is big enough to matter to your customer? Too many products fail here. They deliver value, but they don’t deliver enough value to really move the needle in their customers’ lives. For example, a lot of products promise “ 20% improvement in revenue,” but in some micro-part of a customer’s business. Is that worth anyone’s time if it only touches 2% of the Customer’s business? You’re not competing with other products. You’re competing for my time. And I only give my time to things that matter. Think of it like a consumer mobile app – is it cool enough for me to replace another app on my home screen?

2. Is the value of your product transparent to all involved? Too many software projects from old-school software vendors have great business cases that never pan out. Or at least, no one knows if they pan out. You cannot fundamentally live the life of your customer if you cannot clearly measure the ways in which you’re improving his or her life. At BloomReach we do a lot to measure value – we run control tests, we do analyses to correlate operational metrics with results and we develop ROI studies. We only build products that we believe we would buy if we were the customer. Measurement can be brutally hard and it does not make sense to count every nickel and dime, but if your organization does not care about value delivered, your organization is setting your customer up for the board meeting where they get called out. Value does not always mean revenue generated. It could mean just making someone’s life easier. It could mean improving the user experience of your customer’s business. There are a lot of qualitative ways of creating value. But the value should be palpable.

3. Are you prepared to have an honest conversation with your customer? You will at some point disappoint a customer. There will be a bug in your software. Your release date will slip. Someone will handle a customer care situation badly. Your customer will ask for something totally unreasonable. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to stand up and have the tough conversation where you tell your customer you think they are wrong? Or tell them you have totally screwed something up? If you’re not, you can never be one with your customer. Because you would never misguide yourself (at least knowingly).

I told myself before I started BloomReach that I was only going to start a business-to-business focused company if I could assure myself that the CEO of my customer’s company would care about my product. The world is too noisy for technology that doesn’t matter. I think that’s the starting point for being one with your customer. From there, every aspect of your organization should ask the question, “What would I do if I were the customer?” If I’m selling, is it easy to buy from me? If I’m marketing, do the messages pierce through the noise bombarding my multi-tasking customer? If I’m providing analysis, does my customer care about my analysis? Is it trustworthy? If I’m serving a customer, do my actions get my customer ahead in their organization? If I’m building a product, how hard is it to use the product to fulfill its value proposition? If I’m acting on a support request, how long am I making my customer wait?

The journey to being one with one’s customers is a long one, one that we are very much in the middle of. When you think about customers, remember the famous Jerry Maguire quote from the eponymous movie: